“I really don’t wanna use it,” Arturo said. “But I will, of course. Because if it comes down to a choice between you or me, kid, I choose me every time.”
“I’m sure the gangbanger who killed my daddy had the same attitude,” Cory retorted bitterly. “But what do you care that I learned my lesson about talking to the cops from what happened to him—you had to try to run me and my teacher down anyway.”
“That wasn’t one of my better ideas,” the thug agreed. “I saw the cop there and thought you’d given me up.”
“Sh-yeah right,” she muttered. “Haven’t you listened to a word I said? Talking to cops leads to nothing but trouble. No way would I squeal you out to them. And if you kill me, they’ll never quit hunting you. So why don’t you just let me go? I’ll go home to my mom and you can go back to whatever it is you do.”
Poppy marveled at the girl’s coolheaded negotiation skills when Arturo didn’t immediately shoot the idea down. This just might work.
Then, hearing a sound from the direction in which she’d made her way through the warehouse, she whirled to face the possible new danger, hoping it was help for her but fearing it might be backup for Arturo instead.
Swinging around too fast, she cracked her elbow against one of the boxes. A soft cry escaped her as pain zinged from her funny bone to her hand. The pepper spray canister fell from fingers gone lax and skittered across the concrete floor.
She froze, hoping, praying, that the thug hadn’t heard—then lunged for the pepper spray when she heard footsteps crossing the cleared area. There was no place to hide and she shook the little container to activate the ingredients before tucking it into her palm.
Although why she thought it might help her against a bullet—
Arturo stepped around the wall, his gun pointed straight at her. “Well, well,” he murmured. “If it isn’t the blonde.”
You think maybe this is why Jason wanted you to wait outside for him, genius? Poppy took a step forward, then stopped. Brushing a curl out of her eyes, she watched him slowly approach. When he stopped and gave her an impatient get-over-here gesture with the gun she saw that the wall of boxes was solidly between the teenager and his weapon. “Cory, run!”
“Fuck!” Lunging forward, he snatched her wrist in his fist then all but yanked her off her feet as he sprinted back down the wall of boxes, dragging her behind him. Rounding the end, he came to a dead halt, causing Poppy to stumble against his back. “Sonuvafuckingbitch!”
She peered around him, relief nearly dropping her to her knees when she saw that Cory was nowhere in sight.
Unfortunately that left her the sole focus of Arturo’s attention. And he was not happy when he swiveled to face her.
Her confidence that she’d someday die in her own bed surrounded by her great-grandchildren wasn’t enhanced by the knowledge that her tiny canister of pepper spray was in the hand going numb beneath the punishing grip on her wrist. Slowly, trying to keep the movement off his radar, she inched her free hand toward it.
He raised his gun and pressed its cool steel against the damp skin between her eyebrows. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t blow your head off.”
“Um…you might need a hostage when the cops get here?” Terror clogged her throat, but she was grateful at the moment simply to still be among the living.
And crazily enough, that she hadn’t wet her pants. Talk about sweating the small stuff. Still, it had been touch-and-go there for a second when she’d realized she probably wouldn’t even hear the shot that killed her—and she’d just as soon Jason not find her in that condition.
“Don’t try to con a con man, lady. No cop in his right mind would let you just waltz in here by yourself the way you did.”
“You’ve had her for, what, five minutes?” Jason’s voice demanded coolly. “Try dealing with her for months.”
With the speed of light, Arturo whirled her around and pulled her back against his chest, releasing her wrist and clamping his arm across her upper body so fast she had vertigo. All she understood for a second was that she was suddenly pinned against him with his gun now pressed against her temple instead of between her eyes.
It wasn’t a huge improvement.
Neither did it help that she was looking into Jason’s gun, which was braced by his opposite hand and pointed at her as well. Dragging her horrified gaze from the muzzle, which appeared to be the size of a cannon’s, she raised her eyes to look into his steely gaze. Try dealing with her for months?
“I didn’t give the bitch permission,” he continued flatly. “But as you’re no doubt finding out, she does exactly what she damn well pleases.”
Okay, he wasn’t happy with her—she got that. But Jason didn’t call women bitches. And to sympathize with the man who had tried to run her and Cory down, who had kidnapped the teen? That was so not the man she knew. The man she loved.
Slowly, her fog of fear began to lift.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, though,” he said companionably to Arturo. “She may be a pain in the ass, but my job is to serve and protect—even her. And so far, Mr. Arturo, no one has died. There’s no murder charge pending against you, no Man One. And you’ve got something I’m willing to bargain for.”
The arm around her loosened a fraction, the pistol against her temple pulled back so that it was no longer digging into her skull. “Schultz?”
“Schultz.”
Arturo seemed to be considering it. Then he stiffened behind her and she knew on a visceral level he wasn’t going to take the offer. “I’ve thought about that—I won’t pretend I haven’t,” he said slowly. “But Schultz’s got long arms. And I ain’t spending the next however many years you get my sentence reduced to looking over my shoulder waiting for some Bubba with tats on his knuckles to take his homemade shiv to me.”
“So we talk to the feds. Get you into Witness Protection.”
She felt the rude noise Arturo made rumbling in the chest against her back. “Living in a cinder-block motor court in Butt Fuck, Idaho? Might as well be dead.”
She unclenched her fingers from around the canister, flashing it at Jason.
Who didn’t so much as blink. “I’m an excellent shot, Arturo, and she’s not big enough to hide behind. You might want to rethink that as your final answer.”
“What for? I’m pretty much screwed no matter how you look at it.” The arm around her torso started cinching up and she could feel the hand with the gun moving back toward her temple.
“You’ve got the wrong idea about Witness Protection,” Jason said as if he had all day to discuss its merits. “It amazes me, frankly, how high on the hog some of you mopes live on the taxpayers’ dollar.” His eyes shifted briefly to her. “Now,” he said without changing tone.
She shot the gas over her shoulder, scrunching her eyes shut against stray fumes and wrenching to the left at the same time that a shot rang out.
The grip on her slackened, then fell away entirely, and she felt Arturo’s body slide away from hers, heard it as it hit the cement floor. She stumbled toward Jason on uncoordinated feet.
Reaching out, he grabbed her, swinging her behind him in one smooth move. “Get behind the boxes.”
“Jason…”
“Get behind the boxes.” His voice was surgical steel, slicing with cold precision to the bone.
She got behind the boxes. But peeked around them to watch him.
“Hohn,” he roared and moved cautiously across the open space toward Arturo, his gun still firmly trained on the fallen man. “Should have taken the deal, chief,” Poppy heard him murmur. Kicking Arturo’s gun away, he knelt at the thug’s side and reached out two fingers to feel for a pulse in the man’s throat. Swearing, he yelled his partner’s name again.
Hohn’s voice replied from a distance.
“Call 911. We need an ambulance. Stat!” He turned his attention back to Arturo. “Come on, you sonofabitch. Don’t you die on me. I don’t appreciate being executioner.” He glanced in
her direction. “Where’s Cory?”
“Somewhere in the stacks. She got away.”
Poppy could hear the man she assumed was Hohn barking directions into his phone, his voice growing clearer by the moment. He rounded the corner a second later. Looked her over with the same assessing cop eyes she was accustomed to seeing from Jason, then looked at the man on the floor. “He alive?”
“Yes. But I think I nicked something major—he’s bleeding pretty bad. I need something to compress the wound to slow it down.”
“There’s a towel under the newspaper on the couch,”
Cory’s voice said from behind yet another wall of boxes. “Though I wouldn’t cry too much if the bastard croaked. He was ready enough to kill Ms. C. and me.”
The next hour was a blur. Poppy and Cory huddled together while Jason and Hohn worked to keep Arturo from bleeding out. Then paramedics showed up and took over and soon the warehouse was swarming with cops. Hugging the teen to her side, Poppy found them a corner where they’d be out of the way.
They watched the medics trundle Arturo off on a gurney. Cory, who had been quiet, suddenly rolled her head into Poppy’s collarbone. “I’m sorry, Ms. C.”
“Yeah, I know.” She stroked the girl’s hair with her free hand. “You made some lousy choices today, but you know, everyone makes those at times. I would like to think, though, that this experience will make you stop and think before you follow your next impulse.” A lesson you might want to consider as well.
“Oh, I will. Trust me.” Pale and wan, the teen looked up at her with swimming eyes and a trembling bottom lip. “I was so s-scared. And not just for me. I’m so, so s-sorry. I never would have forgiven myself if you’d been killed because of me.”
“Cory!”
They both started at the sound of Sandy Capelli’s frantic voice calling from the other side of the cardboard barricade. Then Cory screeched, “Mom!” pulled free from Poppy’s embrace and tore across the opening to fling herself into her mother’s arms as the older woman was escorted around the wall by a patrolman.
Hohn came over to Poppy. “Jase asked me to take your statement and then see you safely home. Okay?”
“Yes.” Suddenly she was more than ready to go. She needed to step back from the day’s violence; it had left a miasma of grime on her soul and she wanted nothing more than to wash it away with a hot bath and a cool glass of wine. And once she felt clean once again, she was going to break her self-imposed isolation and call her mother. Or Jane or Ava. Or all three.
But first there was the statement to get through. Quietly, she answered Hohn’s questions until he was satisfied, then let him take her arm to escort her away.
There was no way, however, she could leave without looking back one last time. Jason was talking to a man across the room, but as if he felt her stare, he suddenly glanced straight at her. Without thinking, she gave him a tiny wiggle of her fingers.
He didn’t acknowledge the impulsive gesture with so much as a blink. She couldn’t read, in fact, emotion of any kind in his expression. He turned back to his conversation.
Poppy’s heart clenched. Forcing herself to turn and walk away, it occurred to her that this might be the last time she’d ever see him.
That he truly didn’t love her the way she did him.
And never would.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Talk about the highest of highs and lowest of lows. And all in the space of a day.
JASE ASSURED HIMSELF during the drive over to Poppy’s apartment that he was just stopping by to check on her. It was the right thing to do. She’d been through a nightmare ordeal—even if it was the result of her own fricking recklessness—and someone needed to pay her an official visit to make sure she was all right. Double-check her statement.
Yeah. Climbing out of his SUV, he stared up at her apartment building, then straightened purposefully. This was business. He was doing his job, that’s all.
He only intended to stay a few minutes before he hit the road again. Hell, maybe he’d stop on the way home and pick up some KFC for Murphy—the old guy loved the extra-crispy kind in particular. The two of them could sit down and discuss Jase’s freakin’ huge backlog of cases. Murph might be retired, but Jase didn’t respect anyone more for his intelligent insight when it came to police work.
So, okay, he thought, as he paused outside Poppy’s door, the operative word here was professional. That bore repeating, he decided when he knocked on the solid fir panels perhaps just the slightest bit more forcefully than he needed to.
Then she whipped open the door and her entire face lit up at the sight of him, as if just by showing up he’d made her entire fucking day or something. It was like that little finger-wave thing she’d given him at the warehouse and it hit him like a fist to the solar plexus exactly as it had then.
And his professionalism went down the tubes.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he demanded in a growl maybe a bit too loud and definitely enraged. Grasping her upper arms, he backed her across the short hallway until her shoulders were pressed against the wall. A bright piece of framed Poppy art shifted on its hanger near her head. “Your grandma Ingles laid down the big bucks for that fricking expensive education of yours, but did you bother to exercise your brain at all? I told you to wait for me! Didn’t I tell you not go into that warehouse?” His gut iced over with the same dread he’d felt when he’d been caught in that traffic snarl, unable to stop her.
When he’d been too far away to protect her and left with nothing but the shakiest of goddamn hopes that he’d get there in time to stop her from being hurt.
From being killed.
“But did you listen?” he yelled, his nose a scant inch from her own. “Hell, no—not little Miss Leads-with-Her-Heart! You go barreling into an unknown situation armed with nothing but a quarter ounce of Mace against a thug with a fucking gun!”
“Not Mace,” she whispered, staring up at him and trembling in his grip like a cat catching a whiff of the vet’s office. “Pepper spray.”
“Well, hell, yeah. Because God forbid you peace-and-love types should actually harm a guy bent on killing you!” She trembled harder and his brows snapped together. “Don’t you shake! Don’t you goddamn shake on me now! That’s what you should have been doing in that parking lot instead of charging into the warehouse!”
“I was so scared, Jason.”
“You don’t know what scared is! You weren’t stuck miles away knowing you couldn’t stop the woman you love from walking into danger. That the job you thought was the be-all and end-all of your existence didn’t mean shit if you couldn’t protect her. You didn’t come around those boxes and see a man holding a gun to your head!” And yanking her off her feet, he lifted her to meet his furious kiss.
Her soft lips immediately yielded beneath the press of his own and he tasted wine on her tongue. She wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and without raising his head, he gripped her butt and stumbled into the living room, careening off the archway lintel when his eyes refused to open beneath the pleasure, the sheer killing relief of having her alive and warm in his arms again.
He’d truly believed he’d never get to hold her again for as long as he lived—which, without her, he realized with absolute if sudden clarity, would stretch into an eternal empty wasteland.
“Dear God,” a woman murmured in hushed horror from only feet away. “Is that a gun strapped under his arm?”
“Beth, you can’t seriously care about a little thing like a gun,” Ava Spencer’s voice replied dryly, “when a man who can kiss like that declares his love for your daughter. Man, where’s the popcorn and Jujubes when you need ’em?”
His head jerked up and he stared openmouthed at Poppy’s two best friends and a woman who could only be Mrs. Poppy, if the chocolate-brown eyes and curls escaping a long, graying braid were anything to go by.
Jesus. He never walked into a business, house or apartment without noting everyt
hing around him. But he’d taken one look at Poppy and his never-before-failed-him second nature had taken a vacation. So there sat three women on her little couch and overstuffed chair, staring back at him with emotions ranging from fascination to doubt.
But Mama or no Mama witnessing his hands on her daughter’s ass, he wasn’t putting Poppy down. Fingers tightening around sweet firmness, he rearranged her to a more comfortable grasp. Their gazes met and he got caught up in the topaz flecks within the darkness of her eyes. “So I guess you have company.”
She licked her lips. “They were just leaving.” She looked over at her mother and friends. “Weren’t you, Mom? My sisters?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ava said at the same time Jane murmured, “Is that a desert breeze I feel?”
The redhead laughed and gently pulled Poppy’s mother to her feet. “Come on, Beth,” she said good-naturedly. “I’ll buy you a drink and tell you a story about a little girl who wanted to grow up to marry a sheik.”
“And here I thought I knew everything there was to know about my baby girl,” Beth murmured. She gave Jase and her daughter a severe look. “You two at least practice safe sex. And I’m not talking condoms. You put that damn gun up on a shelf or in a lockbox.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he heard himself agree, then watched in relief as the three women left the apartment with a minimum of fuss.
Poppy leaned back the moment the door clicked closed behind them, her fingers locked behind his neck. “Out in the hallway you said ‘the woman you love.’”
He nodded. Cleared his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”
“And that would be me?”
His brows slammed together and his hands tightened on her butt. “Of course it’s you!”
“Hey, you can’t blame a girl for being confused. That’s quite a turnaround from the last time we talked. You told me you didn’t know how to love.” But Poppy felt a lightness growing in her heart and expanding throughout her. “Let’s sit down,” she suggested softly. “You want a glass of wine or anything?”
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